BSD developers speak out on SCO campaign

NewsForge writers report on what BSD professionals think of SCO's moves in their direction.

In view of the latest SCO lawsuit news conference, we have been talking to BSD professionals to get their opinions, including one of the principals in the AT&T vs. Berkeley Software Design, Inc. lawsuit settlement of 1994; a disillusioned former SCO employee; and several other BSD developers.
At issue is the charge SCO has made in a court case against IBM that copyrighted UNIX code has been incorporated into Linux and distributed without authorization or appropriate copyright notices. Code that has been identified by SCO includes Unix System V code as well as copyrighted code included in the 1994 settlement between Unix Systems Laboratories, Inc. and BSD, Inc. SCO acquired this code and associated copyrights in 1995 from Novell. SCO announced Tuesday that it is expanding the scope of its campaign by incorporating a prominent law firm within its ownership.

"We do have copyrights out there now that are being broken," SCO CEO Darl McBride said Tuesday. "We have a situation with other settlement agreements with respect to the BSD case from a few years ago, where we do have a legal settlement. We are in strong shape to go out and enforce these now, and this is really what (lawyer) David (Boies) and his team are going to be expanding their focus around.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols is editor at large for Ziff Davis Enterprise. Prior to becoming a technology journalist, Vaughan-Nichols worked at NASA and the Department of Defense on numerous major technological projects. Since then, he's focused on covering the technology and business issues that make a real difference to the people in the industry.